# Exploring Temporally-Aware Features for Point Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12218 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12218/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [TSM: Temporal Shift Module for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08383/) (2018)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Efficient Content-Based Sparse Attention with Routing Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05997/) (2020)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Emergent Temporal Correspondences from Video Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17220/) (2025)
- [Generative Video Motion Editing with 3D Point Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02015/) (2025)
- [Seurat: From Moving Points to Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14687/) (2025)
- [Video Understanding: From Geometry and Semantics to Unified Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17840/) (2026)
- [AnthroTAP: Learning Point Tracking with Real-World Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06233/) (2025)
- [Probing and Leveraging Video Diffusion Transformer Features for Robust Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20606/) (2025)
- [Improving Video Diffusion Transformer Training by Multi-Feature Fusion and Alignment from Self-Supervised Vision Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09547/) (2025)
- [Multi-View Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15708/) (2025)
- [GOT-Edit: Geometry-Aware Generic Object Tracking via Online Model Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08550/) (2026)
- [TAPFormer: Robust Arbitrary Point Tracking via Transient Asynchronous Fusion of Frames and Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04989/) (2026)
- [TETO: Tracking Events with Teacher Observation for Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23487/) (2026)
- [M2P: Improving Visual Foundation Models with Mask-to-Point Weakly-Supervised Learning for Dense Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17813/) (2026)
- [Group-DINOmics: Incorporating People Dynamics into DINO for Self-supervised Group Activity Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04467/) (2026)
- [E-TraMamba: A New Paradigm for Efficient Long-Term 3D Feature Tracking with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02866/) (2026)
- [Emergent Region-Level Facial Correspondence in Frozen Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14423/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/